Georges BERNANOS (1888-1948). Autograph manuscript signed, La maladie de la démocratie; 6 pages in-4 in blue ink on sheets of squared paper detached from a notebook. Beautiful and vigorous article published on December 6, 1945 in La Bataille, and collected in Français, si vous saviez..., about De Gaulle's formation of a new government. Responding to a medical analogy by his colleague Royer-Collard in Combat, Bernanos declares that careful monitoring of democracy will not be enough to save it. "It is unfortunately certain that the lightning intervention will occur sooner or later, but it will be that of Caesar, Napoleon, Lenin, Hitler or Mussolini [...] For the disease from which democracy suffers is not at all [...] an unknown disease. We know all about its symptoms and its course"... It manifests itself in a worrying drop in temperature and a fall in blood pressure... "French democracy clearly does not believe itself called to a heroic vocation, nor is it disposed to the sacrificial role of the inventor; it dreads experiments [...] It is moreover less tempted than ever to run the risks, to run any risk, since the Marshal has succeeded in this coup of reassuring it of its mediocrity, of soothing its last scruples, of giving its mediocrity a moral, even religious significance"... In this situation, De Gaulle and the Communist Party are not evenly matched. But the doctrinaires want to make democracy the honor of the Resistance... "By admitting now that the Resistance was the work of a certain number of men determined to die, lost in a crowd of people determined to survive, they fear they will be seen as fascists"... It is indeed unpleasant to admit that the brain of democracy does not succeed in imposing its will on the members, and that this brain thinks for itself, at the expense of its own substance, "condemned to reingurgitate its own secretions, walled up in its cranial box like a prisoner in his dungeon"...